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Topic: What would you choose to fund? UK options? (Read 7794 times)

My candidate is the Seacat 2. A good missilewhich would have allowed all the Seacat fittedships to have a decent BPDMS by the 70s.The discipline of sticking to the lightweight launcherwould have concentrated efforts on the radars andseeker heads. Seawolf should have been vls only.

Washington could easily have been bent to fit, and they were better than what the U.S. and Japan would have built within their matching allowance. But then the follow-on benefits start to happen. The extra hulls are possibly enough to keep another battleship yard (Beardmore's I suspect) in being through the battleship holiday (better still, rewrite Washington to limit building, not ban it, the holiday disastrously penalizes the export-oriented UK yards and the UK delegation should have realised that). Meanwhile the extra ordnance, and any export orders, may allow Armstrong Whitworth to avoid merging with Vickers, leaving us with two naval ordnance centres of excellence in addition to the Navy.

Then when rearmament starts we have sufficient hulls and yards to run the rebuilding programme without holding ships at sea for strategic necessity, which means all of the QEs, Rs, Refit and Repair, and Hood have been refitted to modern standards and reliability when it all kicks off. While at the same time, competing ordnance design organisations mean we likely have the manpower to sort the turret problems that dogged us in real life, and build turrets at the rate we need.

Two G3s at Denmark Straits would have made things very interesting for Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, and Scharnhorst would likely have been hunted down much more quickly. Put a pair into the Med and the Regia Marina burns up even quicker than in OTL, and then the whole RN can execute a Pacific pivot much earlier than 1945.

A properly mandated and qualified oversight of defence contacts and the requirement for vehicles, systems etc to properly fulfill the nations defence needs. This would mean having a consolidated defence statement which is cohesive and allows for changing threat levels.

There were multiple options to replace the Buccaneer, including Scimitar, but there was nothing suitable to replace the SR177. In fact there were strike variants of the SR177 proposed that deleted the rocket and had a more powerful turbojet. If it proved too difficult to develop a strike variant of the Scimitar (tandem seats, radar, nav attack system, then Skyhawk could have been a very interesting option and permitted Hermes and Victorious to remain viable into the 80s.

There was also the Etendard, Fury and dare I say it, the A-6.

"replace the Buccaneer, including Scimitar"Wasn't the Scimitar a dog in terms of safety, reliability and capability, compared to the Buccaneer?

RegardsPioneer

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It was a 'dog' thanks to the RN 'learning' about how to maintain a modern twin engined fighter, how to train to operate from a CV said aircraft, and how to use it.It was a 'dog' thanks to the use of certain solenoids to the fuel system, which had all sorts of problems and I think are the root cause of the leaks it had.

IT was a 'dog' due to a lack of proper 'Area Ruling', making it stubbornly subsonic, lacking reheat (which had been intended for the prototype) and because it lacked full 'blow' over the wing.

Most of that is resolve-able with more being ordered in the Twin seater FAW variant, which also resolves the lack of AI radar and the need for that second crewman.

However it was better for a FAW variant than DH's 110 (Sea Vixen), it had better visibility from the cockpit and was more agile.

Scimitar was good looking but unreliable. It had over 1,000 hours maintenance per flight hours at one stage and 51% of all manufactured aircraft were lost in accidents. It had severe limitations on what it could carry and what aerobatics it could perform - which was, interestingly why it was popular with pilots. Pilots assigned to Scimitar squadrons had many hours flying at light loads as a consequence. I once corresponded many years ago with an ex-FAA pilot who lauded it's performance while noting its limitations.

The Buccaneer S1 was severely underpowered. It's Gyron Junior engines were not the best for such a heavy aircraft and it had reliability issues. The S1 ended it's carreer after a couple of accidents in 1970.